The 2011 Products of the Year Awards recognize the best storage products in the categories of backup and disaster recovery (DR) software/services, backup hardware, networking, storage management tools, storage systems and storage system software. From the hundreds of impressive product entries from vendors large and small, start-up and highly established, the judging panel selected an exceptional group of 48 finalists. In turn, the 18 winners were then selected from among the finalists based on innovation, performance, ease of integration, ease of use, manageability, functionality and value.

The editors of SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine wrote, “As stodgy and slow moving as data storage might seem at times, there’s a remarkable amount of innovation going on at a near non-stop pace. The Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2011 Storage Products of the Year bear that out, as storage vendors once again demonstrated that cutting-edge technology doesn’t have to be some kind of science project but can effectively and practically fit into current environments and make short shrift of existing problems.” The article concluded, “Congratulations to the best data storage products of 2011.”

The SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine Products of the Year Awards have become one of the industry’s most sought after honors due to the meticulous attention and due diligence that is given to each and every entry by its outstanding panel of judges made up of the publications’ first-rate editorial staff and other highly respected industry experts – including the most well-known and respected analysts and end users.

“We are indeed thrilled to have been designated a Silver Award winner in the 2011 Products of the Year Award,” said Momchil (“Memo”) Michailov, Founder and CEO, Sanbolic. “It is a mark of distinction of which we are quite proud and we believe, a reflection of the fact that we stay close to our customer, truly listen, and have built and enhanced a distributed data management solution that directly responds to their real IT and business challenges and requirements.”

Michailov continued, “This award is the icing on the cake of what was truly an amazing year for Sanbolic, during which we enjoyed worldwide sales growth of over 50% – accelerated in large part by record growth in virtual desktop (VDI) customer adoption; released the Melio v3.5, application availability and scalability for critical enterprise workloads and AppCluster v2.0, Microsoft SQL Server high availability (HA) and scalability solutions; as well as continued to strengthen relationships with key strategic partners, such as Microsoft and Intel.”

Extended Hypervisor Support and Integration – integration with Xen, VMware and KVM – the most prevalent hypervisors, w/support for a wide range of guest operating systems including Linux, Solaris and Windows, enabling ease of management and dramatic decrease in CapEx and OpEx. Also enables users to extend virtual layer down into data – all the way to guest operating system – a critical stepping stone to private cloud deployment.

Local Server Storage Sharing – enables creation of shared storage pools using internal storage from existing server assets – allows development and POCs to be completed securely and on a smaller-scale with virtually zero upfront investment.

Synchronous and Asynchronous Mirroring and Replication – increases high availability (HA), data protection and disaster recovery (DR) across local and remote data centers.

Increased Scalability – only solution that enables users to scale to hundreds of hypervisors and thousands of VMs.